Top Quotes: “Egypt on the Brink: From Nasser to Mubarak” — Tarek Osman
Revolution
“Iran’s was the most popular revolution in history, but barely 2 percent of the entire population actually took part in it; the second most popular revolution in history took place in Russia in 1917, when a mere 1.5 percent of the population actively participated.”
“Kassem made clear that the government had made it impossible for secular political movements to operate, leaving the field open to the Islamists: “There is no alternative now for the people, given that Islamists operate out of mosques while secular political parties are not allowed to operate at all.””
“The organizing groups — led by the ‘6th April’ group and the ‘We are all Khaled Said’ group, which had been formed in reaction to the killing by the police of an Alexandrian blogger in summer 2010 — asked their supporters to march to the centre of downtown Cairo, and provided them with tips on how to defend themselves against the anti-riot police and avoid tear gas; the groups also emphasized the peaceful nature of the protest and, through viral emails, repeatedly urged potential demonstrators to adhere to a refined code of behaviour throughout the day. Their aim was to voice grievances and express anger.
Less than 50,000 demonstrators showed up in Cairo, and roughly the same number in Alexandria. These were relatively small numbers that the police could have easily contained. But President Mubarak and his inner circle reacted with extreme edginess and apprehension. A week earlier, what had previously seemed impossible had actually happened: the will of the people had managed to unseat an Arab dictator. The fall of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia after a wave of intense demonstrations had emboldened some Egyptian protestors and shocked most Arab regimes.”
“Thousands of officers and police recruits were deployed in Ramsis Street, one of the main arteries leading to and from Tahrir Square. The strategy backfired. The police’s nervousness, their large numbers and their attempts to contain the demonstrations led to clashes. The regime came across as defiant, arrogant and threatening. On Friday 28 January, not tens but hundreds of thousands of protestors swamped the streets, not only in central Cairo, but in Alexandria, Suez, and other cities in the Nile Delta. The police were overwhelmed; some of their units used rubber bullets, tear gas, and water cannons against the demonstrators; other units refrained; some units opened live ammunition on protestors; in a number of cases, security vehicles chased demonstrators, fired at them, and ran some of them over. This was neither a full attack on the uprising, nor a strategy of containment. The police were clearly confused and without a coherent plan. The ministry of the interior’s decision-making structure was paralysed.
This was a surprising failure. The ministry of the interior and the police’s different divisions enjoyed a quasi-internal army with heavy armaments in the form of the internal security forces. For years, the ministry’s budget was a state secret, but almost certainly ran into billions of dollars; it boasted a highly advanced central command system; and many of its senior officers, including Al-Adly himself, had received formal FBI training in the US. transpired, however, that the ministry’s scenario planning had failed to be put in action; the chain of command crumbled, amidst poor information, confusion and, according to some unsubstantiated sources, different orders from different senior regime figures. By the end of 28 January 2011, the police had completely withdrawn from the Egyptian streets.
The sense of chaos was augmented by the regime’s decision to close down Egypt’s access to the internet, cut off the country’s mobile networks, and impose a complete shutdown on all wireless communications. Over the next few hours, reports and rumours circulated that large numbers of prisoners were allowed to escape from some of Egypt’s most notorious prisons and together with police thugs were at liberty, looting and causing anarchy and havoc. TV channels broadcast scenes of looted supermarkets on the outskirts of Cairo. A number of buildings in central Cairo were set ablaze, including the headquarters of the then ruling National Democratic Party, and fire came perilously close to the Egyptian Museum, which houses the world’s largest collection of ancient Egyptian antiques. In the absence of the police, neighbourhood watch and security groups were set up to protect their areas, in many cases, stopping passers by to check their identity cards. Most Egyptians had never experienced such turmoil and disorder; panic took hold of the country.
The regime decided to deploy the military across Cairo and most large cities to restore order and protect constitutional legitimacy. For many Egyptians, the appearance of the army’s tanks and armoured vehicles in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, and other cities brought about a sense of security. Unlike the police, the army was highly revered and respected by the people. The army made it clear that its mission was securing the country — not attacking the demonstrators, whose numbers continued to grow.
If a number of activist groups had triggered the uprising, Egypt’s political Islamists provided it with hundreds of thousands of organized demonstrators. After initially hesitating to lend its support to a liberal-led initiative, and after tense debates between a hesitant leadership and enthusiastic young members in the middle ranks, the Muslim Brotherhood, the most organized group within the Islamic movement in Egypt, recognized the valuable opportunity to topple its arch-enemy the regime, and mobilized its support base. More than half a million young members joined the protests. They leapt in after the revolt had already gained traction, but they provided the critical mass on the streets. Suddenly, the tens of thousands of demonstrations evolved into million-plus protests across Cairo, Alexandria, and Suez. Young Brotherhood members as well as members of Salafist groups put their organizational skills at work: coordinating groups, providing logistical support, and setting up checkpoints in the main squares where protestors gathered, chiefly to avoid clashes with Mubarak’s supporters, but also to facilitate the provision of supplies.
“Hundreds had died in the successive clashes with the police in the first week of the protests; most Egyptians saw these victims as martyrs for the ‘cause’ of freedom. Tahrir Square suddenly became a symbol of defying not only the regime, but the entire power structure that had dominated Egypt for the past few decades. Very quickly, the movement became a representation of the will of the people, and it was unequivocally bent on the fall of the regime — nothing less. Protestors and commentators alike started to use the term ‘revolution’ in describing what was happening.”
The Aftermath
“The ‘new Egypt’ turned out to be very complicated and divisive. After eighteen months under the rule of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF), during which tens of Egyptians died in demonstrations and confrontations, in summer 2012 Egypt held its first-ever free presidential election. Out of the 52 per cent of the electorate who voted, slightly over 51 per cent elected Mohamed Morsi, a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that had been illegal in Egypt for almost half a century up to the 2011 uprising. Morsi’s sole year in power, from July 2012 to July 2013 when he was deposed by the military after major demonstrations across the country, significantly widened the social polarization the country had witnessed since the revolution. Demonstrations continued; protests widened; various activist groups repeatedly and openly challenged the state. A media war raged between the Islamist movement and the liberal camp. The Brotherhood was mired in various political battles with influential state institutions, including wide sections of the judiciary. It seemed that the country was still on the brink.”
Decline
“In the 1960 film Doctor Dolittle, the American actress Samantha Eggar sang ‘Fabulous Places, a song about a young American’s desire to visit the glamorous cities of the world. She wanted to see London, Paris, Rome, Vienna and Cairo. If the song was remade today, fifty years later, Cairo would not feature in it. The worldly capital of the 1950s has lost its glamour, and turned into a crowded, classic third-world city. Cairo’s descent mirrors the regression of Egyptian society.”
“Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, Egypt’s greatest journalist and the doyen of Arab political commentators, repeatedly described Egypt’s influence in the Arab world and the Middle East from the 1930s to the 1960s not in terms of its political gravitas, or of its relatively advanced military might, but of its ‘soft power’: the Cairo and Alexandria that dazzled foreigners, seduced visitors, educated the region’s elite, bred art and culture, hosted thousands of immigrants from Greece, Italy and Armenia as well as tens of thousands of Jews, and shaped a highly liberal, open society taking its inspiration from Paris and Rome. By the beginning of the twenty-first century, Egyptian society was devoid of cosmopolitanism, increasingly intolerant and highly conservative, even in comparison with other Arab societies in North Africa, the Levant and even the Gulf.”
“Economically, despite significant improvements in the country’s infrastructure (especially in utilities and telecommunications), and despite an average GDP growth rate of circa 6 per cent throughout the 2000s, Egypt was ranked in the lower 40 per cent of all developing countries in the UN’s 2007 Human Poverty Index. This was a reflection of the difficulty of Egyptians’ daily lives, from the crumbling education system and decrepit heath care, to humiliating transportation.”
“In 2007, 32 per cent of the population were completely illiterate (42 per cent of women), 40 per cent of the population were at or below the international poverty line and GDP per capita (at purchasing power parity) was less than half that of Turkey and 45 per cent of South Africa’s.”
The Beginning of Modern Egypt
“Most historians regard Mohamed Ali, who ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1849, as the ‘founder of modern Egypt’ and the architect of its first developmental project. Mohamed Ali, who was of Albanian origin, came to Egypt as a soldier in an Ottoman garrison only to witness Napoleon’s invasion and conquest in 1798. Napoleon considered Egypt ‘the strategic prize of the Orient.’ He reckoned that by capturing Egypt, France would anchor an empire in the Middle East, and block Britain’s route to its most important colony, India. But Napoleon’s campaign was a failure. The French were unable to maintain order; Egyptians revolted more than five times in less than three years. Nelson destroyed the French navy at Abukir in the Battle of the Nile just a few weeks after the invasion. Napoleon’s siege of Acre in 1799 broke down, and his commanding general in Egypt, Kleber, was assassinated.
In 1801, the French withdrew. By manipulating the religious establishment and eliminating the remnants of the Mamelukes, Mohamed Ali managed to fill the political void, and gain control of the country. His experience of France’s weapons, ships, scientific knowledge and sophisticated administrative systems convinced him that the nascent state should dispense with Ottoman heritage and embrace a Europeanized destiny. In 1808, Mohamed Ali broke with the Ottoman legacy of four centuries (since Selim I’s conquest of Egypt in 1517) by confiscating all of the country’s land, thus rendering worthless all its title deeds and establishing himself as its sole owner. The redistribution that followed benefited his family. In the 1850s, they controlled more than half of all of Egypt’s farmland. By the late 1880s, and after a major wave of land divestment following the exile of Khedive. Ismael, Mohamed Ali’s grandson, the family continued to own more than a fifth of the country’s land. The redistribution also profited a select group of Albanian and Turkish officers and soldiers of fortune who had stood by Mohamed Ali in his military and political adventure.”
“Mohamed Ali’s and Ismael’s efforts were the basis of a developmental project, but at heart it was not an ‘Egyptian’ one. Mohamed Ali’s largesse over landownership did not extend to Egyptians themselves. None of his key managers or administrators was Egyptian, and Egyptians, though subjected to the new conscription system, were not allowed to graduate as officers, let alone commanders or leaders. Neither Mohamed Ali nor any of his descendants (up to King Fuad, who ascended to the throne in 1917) even spoke classical Arabic, let alone mastered the Egyptian variant (Turkish was the language of administration up to the second half of the nineteenth century, when a breed of Europe-educated Egyptian bureaucrats began to take leading roles in government agencies and ministries, and started to Arabize the the administrative system). Mohamed Ali’s and Ismael’s developmental project was dynastic — the vision of intelligent and ambitious men trying to build an empire based on a rich country that they had managed to subjugate.
Before the 1952 coup that ended the Egyptian monarchy, Mohamed Ali (the founder of the ruling dynasty) was presented in Egyptian educational history books as a Muslim leader who earned Egyptians’ trust and admiration after he liberated them from the Mamelukes and defended them against the injustices of the Ottomans. Post-1952, however, and after the fall of his dynasty, the Pasha became a ‘foreign adventurer’ who subordinated the country and its people.”
Nasser
“In January 1952, as a result of a chain reaction of provocations and confrontations between the British army, the Egyptian police, the Palace and Al-Wafd, a number of riots in some Cairene neighbourhoods descended into anarchy and mayhem. Thousands of protestors marched on downtown Cairo, breaking into retail shops, cafes, cinemas, hotels, restaurants, theatres, nightclubs and even the country’s Opera House, splashing them with petrol and setting some of them alight. Within hours, the riot spread from Al-Ismailiya district (the heart of belle époque Cairo) to other neighbourhoods, and took the lives of tens of Egyptians. By the end of the day, swaths of Cairo’s historical centre were consumed in flames and lost forever. The ‘Cairo fire’ — in which young Egyptians burnt the centre of their capital while the country’s rulers and elite watched in fear and impotence — signalled the end of an era: it was a clear indication that the regime had no future.”
“The Egyptian military was traditionally loyal to the monarchy. But Egypt’s humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel in the 1948 war had alienated large groups of young officers who felt that their monarch (and government) had failed them by sending them into war badly prepared and with inadequate weapons.”
“In July 1952, while Al-Wafd’s leaders were relaxing in St Moritz and Cannes, a number of armed brigades mounted a coup against King Farouk. The people poured joyfully into the streets, and cheered on the young officers who led the coup as agents of change. This swift action, conducted by less than a hundred officers — almost all drawn from junior ranks — ended the country’s political experiment of the previous half century. In less than twelve months, the young officers abolished monarchism, established republicanism, put an end to the country’s parliamentary system, abolished political parties and jailed (or sidelined) almost all the key politicians of the bygone era. The July 1952 coup quickly turned into a revolution that — with the people’s blessing initiated a new phase in Egypt’s history. The almost immediate popular endorsement enabled the young officers to jettison the institutions, norms, modus operandi and even accumulated experience of the liberal experiment. The officers, chief among them the rising star Gamal Abdel Nasser, discarded the past as well as the present and launched a transformative political and social project. Egypt changed forever.”
“Nasser was a man of the Egyptian soil who had overthrown the Middle East’s most established and sophisticated monarchy in a swift and bloodless move — to the acclaim of the millions of poor, oppressed Egyptians — and ushered in a programme of ‘social justice, ‘progress and development’ and ‘dignity’: a nation-centred developmental vision.
This was a momentous event: the first time, in thousands of years, that a native Egyptian had ruled Egypt and articulated a coherent vision of its future. Since the fall of Egypt to Alexander the Great in 332 BC, arguably every single ruler of Egypt had been a foreigner — from the Ptolemic Greeks to the Romans, to the Persians, to the Romans again, to the Arab Muslims (under various different dynasties), to the North African Fatimids, to the Kurd Ayyubids, to the Mamelukes, who hailed from various parts of Turkey and the Caucasus, to the Albanian and Anatolian Mohamed Ali Pasha dynasty. True, Egypt had always managed — as many of the country’s historians have argued — gradually to assimilate successive foreign rulers and invaders, and the cultures they brought with them, into parts of its rich native melting pot. Alexander the Great pronounced himself the son of Ra (the Egyptian sun god). His successors became pharaohs and Nile queens — from Ptolemy the First to Cleopatra (the Seventh, to be specific). The Arabs shunned their desert ways and turned native. Saladin made the country his home. Most of the Turks who came with the Ottomans and later the Mohamed Ali dynasty never left. But their culture and that of Egypt’s other rulers, in origin and formation, were foreign. Nasser’s was not.”
“In 1950, more than one-third of all fertile land was owned by less than 0.5 per cent of Egyptians, while another third was shared among 95 per cent of mostly poor farmers. Such vast concentration, in a mainly agrarian economy where land was almost the only real reservoir of wealth, entailed a major skewing of wealth generation and accumulation — not only in agriculture and agribusiness, but across all economic fronts. The distorted landownership structure lay at the heart of the injustices Nasser wished to purge.
His policy in this area had immense social effects as well as proving to be a masterstroke of populist politics. Land reform was enacted through enforcing a 100-acre ceiling on the size of any single family’s holding; ending absentee ownership; capping rent on leased lands; strengthening the legal rights of peasants (al-fella-hin); and, crucially, confiscating hundreds of thousands of fertile acres from major landowners and distributing them to millions of landless peasants. Today, almost five decades later, the footage of Nasser distributing landownership titles to poor peasants in drab jalabeyas is still a powerful — and moving — symbol of the rise of the poor classes (Al-Tabaquat Al-Fakeera) and the transformation of a feudal system into one based on ‘equity and progress’.”
“The completion of the High Dam in Aswan enabled the electrification of the whole country, not least the remote villages of the Delta and Al-Saeed regions.
Nasser was indeed a revolutionary, fired by an absolute determination to change society. The combination of the land-reform programme and the creation of the public sector resulted in around 75 per cent of Egypt’s gross domestic product (GDP) being transferred from the hands of the country’s rich either to the state or to millions of small owners.”
“The country’s economy grew at an average rate of 9 per cent per annum for almost a decade. The extent of cultivated land increased by almost a third (an achievement that had eluded Egyptians for more than a millennium); the contribution of manufacturing to GDP rose from around 14 per cent in the late 1940s to 35 per cent by the early 1970s. Manufacturing was also rapidly becoming the country’s largest employer. And by 1970 (the end of Nasser’s rule), out of 21 less developed countries surveyed by the OECD, Egypt had by far the largest share of labour force employed in manufacturing, despite the inclusion of more developed countries such as Argentina and Chile. Unemployment and inflation were at record lows throughout the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. Egypt also made great advances in technological development in the Nasser years (especially through cooperation with India and Czechoslovakia). The country seemed to be striding forward, to the extent that the World Bank was even comparing the Egyptian ‘developmental experiment’ with that of leading emerging markets such as South Korea.”
“Arab nationalists contend that the war was a deliberate trap for Nasser, a calculated attempt to strike the Arab nationalist project and discredit its hero. Israel’s official record represents the war as the culmination of a chain of events started by border tensions between Israel and Syria, followed by Nasser’s rushing to support Syria, and reached its climax with Nasser’s May 1967 decision to expel the United Nations Emergency Force from Sinai (where it had been stationed since the end of the Suez Crisis in 1957) and close the Strait of Tiran (in the Red Sea) to all ships flying Israeli flags. Intentions and narratives aside, what is undisputable is that Israel occupied Sinai, the West Bank (previously under Jordanian guardianship), the Syrian Golan Heights and Jerusalem (with all the emotional and historic connotations attached to the city), obliterated three-quarters of the Egyptian air force and crushed the backbone of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. This effectively marked the end of the Nasserite project. President Sadat, years later, commented that Nasser did not die on 28 September 1970 but on 5 June 1967 (the day the war broke out). He was right. The defeat had a devastating impact on Nasser’s health — and his ego. Much more importantly, it redefined how the people, ordinary Egyptians (the hero’s true constituency), saw him. The hero, the historical giant, the dream, was revealed to be a mere inept leader presiding over a failing system. He trusted military commanders who proved to be incompetent and hopeless (King Hussein of Jordan once described Marshal Amer, the general commander of the Egyptian army in 1967, as ‘retarded’); the great leader rushed into a battle only to be trounced in less than a week. The Arab nationalist project lost its momentum and its appeal. No longer were Nasser’s actions ‘historic’, no longer was the nation moving on a generational stride towards victory. Nasser became mortal: merely the president of a poor, third-world country that had been humiliatingly defeated in a war: For the first time ever, Egyptians rioted against Nasser; in March 1968, thousands of university students took to the streets to condemn what they saw as lenient verdicts on the military leaders responsible for the 1967 setback, and later in the same year, workers in different factories held strikes against the regime. The society experienced a psychological dilemma.
Right after the defeat, most Egyptians rejected Nasser’s emotional resignation, delivered live on TV; that night, millions filled Cairo’s streets hailing his name, demanding that he ‘return to lead’; society felt ‘orphaned’ by Nasser’s potential disappearance from the helm. Yet the same millions who poured into the streets singing his praises felt cheated, let down — and made their bitterness clear. The scar was not of the military defeat, but of the crumbling of the belief in the hero.”
“Nasser supplanted Egypt’s liberal experiment with a suffocating military bureaucratic system. That halted the potential progress towards a genuine liberal democracy in the country, and ended Egypt’s then close interaction with the West in general and Europe in particular. This had a lasting impact on society’s development.”
“The main reason Nasser could not establish a state was that all of the new vehicles that he had created in the country, the pillars of his project — the new economic system after land reform, the societal changes that the industrialization and the nationalization policies had ushered in and the new Arab nationalist identity and foreign policy — were all personified in him; intentionally or not, the Nasserite socio-political venture revolved around the man himself. He failed to link his project with the major advances of the liberal experiment that had preceded him. He portrayed his project as starting, in effect, from scratch. That cutting-off from the past suited the revolutionary positioning of the project, and the glorification of the hero. But it meant that Nasser severed his project from its context: the past and the historical flow that had led to it. That disconnection made his project, almost, an aberration in Egypt’s modern life. And crucially, it diluted the project’s chances of survival.
The consent of the people, the basis of legitimacy upon which the entire Nasserite project had been based, was positioned as a mandate for the man himself — not for the project. When the man ceased to exist, the mandate was withdrawn. The project’s vehicles (which were supposed to have evolved into the state’s lasting institutions) appeared to have been just administrative means, drawing their power from the leader’s own legitimacy, the people’s consent to him — rather than from a system imbuing those new vehicles with institutional legitimacy.
The personification of Nasser’s developmental project also put time pressure on the whole venture. Glorifying the hero necessitated very rapid moves and quick wins. Each year, every major speech had to herald new achievements. The land reform, the spreading of the public sector, the call for Arab nationalism could have evolved more slowly, allowing these transformational enterprises to mature and the people to develop alongside in order to make the best of them. That did not happen. The speed of these social changes outpaced the development of Egyptian society and the people. Land reform and asset nationalization resulted in a far more equitable land and asset distribution across the economy, but the new owners and managers were hardly on a par with the grand objectives of the developmental endeavour they were leading; the historical context and bold objectives of Arab nationalism transcended the realities of a poor, less developed society.
The lack of institutionalization and the personification of the project made it relatively easy for his successors (who came with very different convictions, strategies and programmes) to steer the country away — completely — from the Nasserite project. Sadat, for example, abolished Nasser’s socialism; altered Egypt’s strategic orientation from Arab nationalism and a close friendship with the USSR to an alliance with the United States; shunned progressive revolutionism and joined Saudi-led Arab conservatism; diluted the public sector in favour of a resurgent capitalism; and reversed the regime’s relationship with its people: from a bottom-up legitimacy based on the masses’ consent to top-down imposition of power.
Arab nationalism, from the 1970s to the 2000s, has been in political retreat. Only one Nasserite candidate won in Egypt’s parliamentary election of 2005.”
Islamism
“The change can be measured in the increase in the proportion of women in Egypt wearing the veil, from less than 30 per cent to more than 65 per cent in two decades; by the early 1990s, the veil was established as the dress code on the Egyptian street rather than as an occasional choice. In the less-privileged villages of the Nile Delta, as well as in Cairo’s and Alexandria’s poorest neighbourhoods, the veil became the natural step for girls as young as twelve. There was also a general shift in the socially preferred pattern of gender roles, with the return to an emphasis on men’s public role and women’s domesticity. At the same time, Cairo and other Egyptian cities witnessed a dramatic rise in the number of mosques. Thousands of prayer rooms (Zawyas) were established in garages and ground-floors in rich and poor neighbourhoods alike. In the mid-1980s there was a mosque for every 6,031 Egyptians, by the mid-2000s, there was a mosque for every 745 persons. Even colloquial Egyptian changed: ‘Good morning’ (Naharak Saeed) and ‘Good evening’ (masaa al-kheir) were replaced by ‘peace be upon you’, Islam’s greeting (al-salamu aleikom’).”
“In 1977, Sadat introduced the ‘Shame Law’ which gave the state wide powers to prosecute anyone who threatens the values of the society’; the values were defined as the genuine traditions of the Egyptian family. The law also prosecuted those who propagate views that are not in step with divine religions.
The economic situation in the 1970s and 1980s also supported the rise of the religious movement. Open economic policies that Sadat introduced in the mid-1970s put enormous pressures on Egypt’s middle class, which witnessed a significant erosion in its purchasing power and its relative standing in society (especially with the rise of segments of the country’s lower classes that had significantly benefited from the economic consequences of the migration to the Gulf); the result was a damaging reshuffling in its composition. These pressures in turn provided an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood to reestablish its presence in Egyptian society.”
“The factor that really cemented the Brotherhood’s social re-emergence, and founded the Islamic movement’s social base, was its highly efficient services infrastructure.
This included a range of provisions targeted at the poor and needy: affordable healthcare in the form of ‘Islamic hospitals’, ‘non-corrupt’ food-distribution centres in poor neighbourhoods, practical assistance in finding jobs (especially targeted at newly graduated Muslims), welfare benefits, innovative transport solutions in some of Cairo’s and Alexandria’s most crowded suburbs, accommodation for out-of-town students (in addition to lecture notes and study groups) and humanitarian activities in some of Egypt’s most deprived areas. Through these vehicles the Brotherhood developed a matrix of social services that the Egyptian government, crushed by macro-economic burdens, was unable to provide. The Brotherhood’s social infrastructure was both its most potent political instrument and its claim to legitimacy, especially after many years of absence from the Egyptian street. At a time when the socio-economic consequences of al-infitah were eroding the regime’s legitimacy, the Brotherhood was positioning itself to the majority of Egyptians as ‘the provider’, a role the regime was incapable of fulfilling.”
“The orientation away from Europe and to the Gulf was partly the result of Europe’s policy of curbing migration, especially from North Africa. London, Paris, Vienna and Rome, which in the 1950s and 1960s welcomed cheap labour, were, by the 1980s and 1990s, restricting entry, and so were increasingly off-limits to the vast majority of young Egyptians searching for work opportunities abroad.”
“The Gulf region has undergone impressive development at the same time as Egypt has stagnated — in terms of economic growth, living standards, internationalization and of becoming an attractive destination for world-class expatriates. This has given credence in the Arab world to the notion that development and progress need not be associated with Western lifestyles, schools of thought and social frameworks. No longer, it seems, do successful professionals, professors, social commentators, entrepreneurs and politicians need to be Anglo- or Francophiles extracted from successful careers in London, New York and Paris and planted in Cairo; Saudi-, Kuwaiti- and Dubai-philes were emerging.”
“In June 2012, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi won the country’s first-ever free presidential election with slightly over 51 per cent of the vote. In December 2012, the constitution, drafted by an Islamist-dominated Constituent Assembly, was ratified by 60 per cent of the third of the registered voters who turned out to decide upon it. Less than two years after the 2011 uprising, the Muslim Brotherhood was at the apex of political power in Egypt, and the Islamic movement in general was by far the most influential political force in the country.
But power brought the Islamists immense challenges. In the first few weeks following his election, President Morsi had a very cagey relationship with the commanders of the armed forces. In August 2012, less than six weeks after his inauguration, the President ordered the retirement of the Chairman of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (who had been the de facto head of the Egyptian state between the ousting of President Mubarak and the transfer of power to Morsi) along with several of the military’s key leaders. Even thereafter, the relationship remained tense, with each side reticent about its power and spheres of influence. The President and the Brotherhood also entered into a protracted political confrontation with wide segments of the judiciary, a hugely influential institution in the country and a pillar of the Egyptian first republic. In March and April 2013, a law was proposed to ‘Organize the Judicial Authority’; it included a clause that would lower the retirement age of judges from seventy to sixty, and thus retire over two thousand of the country’s most senior judges. A highly publicised political fight ensued between the Judges Club, an unofficial, though highly respected, association of the judges, and various sections within the Islamist movement and at its centre the Muslim Brotherhood.
The Brotherhood also faced outrights attacks and rebellions. In the first week of December 2012, days after President Morsi had issued a constitutional declaration granting his decrees full immunity (a move designed to protect the Constituent Assembly, which was then drafting the country’s new constitution, from the risk of being dissolved by the Supreme Constitutional Court), hundreds of thousands of mainly young Egyptians demonstrated in Tahrir Square in Cairo and several prominent public spaces across the country, against the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood. The slogan of No to the rule of the Brotherhood’s General Guide became a catchphrase for many protests across the country.
Confrontations between protestors and forces from the Interior Ministry left tens dead and hundreds injured. Satellite TV channels broadcast live the battles’ taking place across several parts of Cairo and Alexandria. On 4 December, protestors attacked the presidential palace; several groups managed to storm into the compound’s inner yard, and President Morsi, at the urging of some senior security professionals, was ushered out of a back door. A few weeks later, Port Said, the largest city at the northern end of the Suez Canal, was in revolt; some of its most prominent civil society leaders had called for a civil mutiny against the central state. The overt reason was a judicial ruling that had convicted twenty of the city’s youths of involvement in a stadium massacre the year before that had left over seventy people dead. But beneath the surface there was defiance against the new powers in Egypt: the Islamists led by the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. The intensity of the feelings and the solidarity of the youth groups in the city prompted the strategists of the Interior Ministry to advise against engaging with the protestors. Quietly the police withdrew from the city, and, at the urging of the President, army units were deployed to maintain stability and defend the strategically important Suez Canal against any potential sabotage. Weeks later, the Muslim Brotherhood’s headquarters in the Cairene Moqattam suburb were attacked by young activists who tried to storm them.
The rise to power of political Islam was rapidly fostering a severe polarization of Egyptian society. Several national dialogues proved futile, with the Islamists (from the Brotherhood and the Salafists, as well as new emerging groups) and the liberals failing to reach compromises on any of the major milestones in the political transition that Egypt was undergoing. In early July 2013, this impasse erupted into mass protests that saw Morsi forced to resign by the military.”
Sadat
“Al-infitah introduced different forces of change. The rise of the private sector and foreign direct investments, and the corresponding decline in the role (and status) of the public sector in the 1970s and 1980s, led to substantial income gaps between workers of both sectors. The public sector’s top talent and elite university graduates moved to much better paying (and more prestigious) jobs in the private sector; a young marketer in the Cairo branch of, say, an international consumer-goods company could earn more than five times the salary of a senior public-sector executive. But millions of government employees, the bulk of Egypt’s middle class at the time, were left stuck in the increasingly marginalized, stagnant and low-paying public sector.
The story of the public sector in Egypt remains untold. For more than three decades it was the backbone of the Egyptian economy and almost the sole production arm serving the country’s military efforts. The changes that al-infitah brought deprived the sector of vital investments and, to a large extent, worsened its many administrative and incentivization problems. However, it remained until the early 2000s the key pillar of the Egyptian economy. In a series of long TV interviews with the Egyptian journalist Emad-el-Din Adeeb, Dr Aziz Siddqui, one of the key architects of Nasser’s economic policy, discussed the factors that ‘necessitated the creation of the public sector’; he did not examine, however, the development — or the deterioration — of the sector. The views of other key people, unfortunately, were not recorded. The massive population growth in the 1950s and 1960s, and the skewed nature of Egypt’s educational system, exacerbated the gap between the public and private sectors. Every year from the mid-1970s onwards, a few thousand skilled graduates joined the large, successful private-sector companies, while hundreds of thousands more were relegated, through the hapless Public Employment Office, to the increasingly desolate public sector.”
“Sadat’s promises of prosperity came after more than thirty years of continuous wars, struggles and overly ambitious developmental programmes that took an enormous collective toll on Egyptians. The prosperity (rakhaa) of al-infitah was supposed to be the people’s, reward. But the excesses of the 1970s; the pressures on the middle class; the emergence of a new upper class of merchants, middlemen, brokers and shady liaisons; and the unabashed alliance between power and money all were turning Sadat’s vision into an empty promise. Millions of Egyptians felt cheated, that their reward was instead being reaped by a privileged elite floating over them.
Al-infitah’s fusion of power and wealth was especially shocking because it was the exact opposite of the principles of the Nasserite socialist experiment. It seemed to revoke almost all of Nasser’s major policies, from free education to social equality, reform to abolition of feudalism, nationalization to progressive taxation, the public sector to active income redistribution, and the severing of the relationship between capital and power. The dreams of equality and social justice that animated the 1960s were dissolving, and the fruits of the replacement were hard to see.
Sadat’s image as the hero of the 1973 war began to fall apart; his status as ‘the family’s patriarch’ crumbled; his credibility disintegrated. A number of political opponents, from Arab nationalists and Nasserites to new Islamic groups, came to the fore. More ominously, Egyptians were becoming increasingly angry and resentful. The uprising of 18–19 January 1977 in which millions took to the streets of Cairo burning, looting and cursing the regime — and Sadat — was only the most extreme incident.
Sadat’s apologists lay the blame for the poor undertaking of al-infitah on Egypt’s substandard administrative system and widespread low-level corruption.”
Mubarak
“Hosni Mubarak was propelled into the presidency by Anwar Sadat’s assassination in October 1981 — an assassination carried out by ‘his’ army in front of ‘his’ people, live on TV. Mubarak, who as vice-president was sitting beside Sadat, received a bullet in the wrist — and a clear message in the head. He needed to stabilize Egypt, grab hold of the country as Jehan Sadat (the dead leader’s widow) advised him at his inauguration. Most observers expected Mubarak to distance himself from the 1970s alliance of power and money, and to amend the regime’s relationship with the people. He was considered a fresh face, neither an insider of Sadat’s clique nor implicated in any of al-infitah’s scandalous corruption cases. A number of observers saw the Mubarak presidency as the military establishment ‘grabbing hold’ of an Egypt on the brink of social unrest.
But Mubarak decided against a radical move away from his predecessor’s stance. He ignored the political failure of al-infitah and concentrated on its economic side. He championed the notion that economic, rather than political, reform was the priority and that change could be very disruptive, unless the country’s economic foundations were strong and solid. Unlike Sadat, he did not aim for any major political transformation. He had no interest in any substantial change in the country’s power dynamics.”
Christians
“Egyptian Christians, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, were at the forefront of the renaissance that propelled the country towards a cultural and economic resurgence. The Christian Takla family, in 1875, founded Al-Haram, Egypt’s pre-eminent daily newspaper. George Abyad was the creative force behind the birth of the Egyptian theatre. Ya’acoub Artin guided the transformation from a religion-based teaching doctrine towards a civic educational system. Christians who were close to the experiment of the Levant’s House of Wisdom (Dar Al-Hikma) were among the leading figures that founded Fuad I University (later Cairo University), the first Western-styled educational institution in the Arab world. Acia and other Christian producers and directors led the growth of Egyptian cinema. The first banking, translation and automated manufacturing facilities in the country were introduced by Egyptian Christian entrepreneurs and businessmen. Some of the most visible figures in the history of the Egyptian economy over the past century and a half were Christians.”
“An equal momentum came from the tens of thousands of families that decided to send their daughters to school; from the thousands that insisted on teaching their children English and French; from the major transformations of the educational, administrative and judicial systems into modern, Europeanized ones; and from the social change towards modern clothing, art and tastes. Christian families were pioneers on all of those fronts.”
“Christianity proper came to Egypt in 43 CE when St Mark visited the country and bestowed the priesthood on Hananya, a Jewish Egyptian who would later play a primary role in leading a number of missionary efforts in the country. St Mark visited again in 65 cE; by that time, Egyptian Christians were a sizable community, and increasingly under pressure from the Romans. A number of scholars believe Mark wrote his gospel during that visit, shortly before his assassination at Serapis temple in Alexandria. St Mark’s remains were buried in Alexandria until Venetian merchants and soldiers smuggled them back to their city state. Those remains would later become the base for the world-famous cathedral, today at the centre of Piazza San Marco in Venice, which was later named ‘the Republic of St Mark’.
Over the following few centuries, Christianity enjoyed tremendous growth throughout Egypt, and quickly became the country’s main religion. Christianity’s peacefulness corresponded with the Nile valley’s serenity and quiet farming life; and by the fourth century, Christianity was the religion of almost all Egyptians from Alexandria in the north to the deep Saeedi south. There are a number of studies on the early years of Christianity in Egypt, and the reasons the new religion proved highly successful in the country. On one side, Christian theology resembled many aspects of old Egyptian religions: the holy trinity of a father, mother and son-god; the virgin birth; and the resurrection from death. But perhaps more importantly, Egyptians saw in the new humane religion a reprieve from the oppression of the pagan Romans, and a solid socio-political catalyst for differentiating themselves from their occupiers.”
“For more than four centuries following Islam’s conquest of Egypt (in 640 CE), the vast majority of Egyptians remained Christian. Islam’s conquest of Egypt has always been a historical puzzle: a weak army of around 4,000 warriors taking over a huge country such as Egypt and defeating its strong Roman garrison. One reasonable explanation is that the Egyptian population, antagonistic towards the Roman rulers, threw their lot in with the Arab invaders, seeing them as political liberators, rather than the heralds of a new divine revelation. It was only the establishment of Arabic as the state’s official language at the beginning of the eighth century that compelled Egyptian Christians to start learning Arabic in order to keep their jobs in government and administrative offices, and that presaged a wave of conversions to Islam. Christians, however, remained more than 40 per cent of the country’s population until the mid-sixteenth century. In the next century, Egypt was on the receiving end of two major migration waves from the Arabian peninsula, and in addition saw many Christians convert to Islam (in part as a result of sustained Ottoman efforts across the key provinces of the empire). By 1700, Muslims accounted for around 75 per cent of the population.”
“Between 1880 and 1953, more than 40 of the 100 families with the largest landownership in Egypt were Christian; in Al-Saeed, the ratio was much higher. Christians owned some of the country’s most important manufacturing facilities, retail empires, shipping companies, insurance and banking entities, and were invariably represented in key business associations. Economic power in a relatively relaxed and liberal social environment was the route to social prestige, glamour and influence across various socio-economic domains — politics, journalism and the arts. All that ended in the 1950s and early 1960s.
Land reform and the subsequent socialist laws implemented by the Nasserite regime stripped those families of their power and effectively blocked them from all avenues of engagement with society. A significant majority of those families, after decades of economic indulgence and sumptuous lifestyles, were too westernized, too detached, to remain in a changing country and to start afresh. The result was a notable wave of Christian emigration from Egypt, comprising those families that, a few years earlier, had been social luminaries in the country.”
“The violence against Christians was the third factor behind their social withdrawal. Egypt witnessed cycles of violent sectarianism, and Christians were positioned as a victimized minority. In 2005, a DVD of the performance of a play mounted at the historical Mar Girgis Church in Cairo — purportedly denigrating Islamic beliefs as well as the Prophet Mohamed — was widely distributed. A large mob besieged the church, where at the time more than 150 Christian girls were attending a religious lesson. There was panic, stone-throwing and near disaster. A few months later, at the same church, a group of young Muslims outraged at alleged anti-Islam slurs at a summer festival again attacked the church; for a second time, forceful police action prevented tragedy.
In other areas, such as the village of Al-Kosheh in Al-Saeed, repeated waves of violence left around twenty Christians and two Muslims dead; some churches were burned in Asyut and other attempts in northern Al-Saeed and the Delta were foiled. Even in Cairo and Alexandria, there were many attacks on churches, some involving Molotov cocktails (such as the bombing of Al-lidiseen Church in Alexandria on New Year’s Eve 2010, in which twenty-one Christian worshippers were killed), and Christians’ properties (especially jewellery shops) were attacked. There were also assaults by militant Islamists (mainly Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya) that left dozens of Christians dead, sometimes as a result of refusing to pay protection money.
The violence, the dilution of economic power in the 1950s and 1960s, the move towards Arabism and, inherently with it, embracing Islamic history and culture, and the rise of Islamism led to Christian withdrawal and retreat — whether to the different social enclaves that had emerged in the country’s socio-economic life, or physically through emigration.”
“A certain sectarianism has taken its toll on the fabric of Egyptian society. It is felt in the Christians’ withdrawal into economic enclaves, the emergence of Christian neighbourhoods, in clearer dividing lines in university classrooms and professional syndicates, in the near impossibility of any Christian politician winning an election in any constituency with a Muslim majority, in job advertisements ‘for Muslims only’, in dress codes (especially after the exponential increase in the number of veiled women in Egypt), even in slang.
The situation was becoming alarming; and by the early 1990s the regime was compelled to intervene. A number of albeit toothless ministries — emigration and environment — became the preserve of Christians; some senior, yet marginal, positions in the interior ministry were allocated to heavily vetted Christian officers; President Mubarak consistently assigned the majority of the ten parliamentary seats he had the right to appoint to Christian politicians (thus avoiding the embarrassment of a Christian-free parliament); the Eastern Christmas (7 January) and Easter became national holidays.”
“In the end, however, Mubarak had no choice. The fall of oil prices in the mid- and late 1980s meant that the jobs of hundreds of thousands of Egyptian migrant workers in the Gulf evaporated; there were also significant reductions in foreign direct investments and a fall in revenues from Suez Canal trade. The Egyptian regime suddenly had an acute need for short-term financial help, and in 1991 was obliged to accept IMF prescriptions.
This reversal might not have mattered had a decade of treatment by tranquillizer been followed by the long-term effect associated with curative medicine. That did not happen. Rather, the IMF’s structural reforms, which cut deep into the welfare system, pensions and key subsidies, exposed the fact that for the first time in many decades, Egypt (and the Egyptians) had no national project of its (and their) own — neither a Europe-inspired modernization programme, a vibrant liberal experiment aiming to liberate Egypt from the occupier, a grand Arab nationalist dream, nor a major political or economic transformation.”
“A large part of the problem was that President Mubarak was unable or unwilling to connect with his people in a more ‘personal’ way. Even after being ruled by him for almost thirty years, Egyptians knew very little about Hosni Mubarak as an individual. His persona remained associated with state ceremonies and public events; while the thoughts, feelings and dispositions behind the facade were a mystery to the people. Egyptians heard that he was a fan and a good player of squash, and enjoyed traditional Egyptian folk music; but he never played the sport or displayed such affection in public.”
“It was an opportune moment. At the Madrid peace conference, Israel saw its strategic ally, the United States, dictating the terms of engagement to all Arab states. The USSR, represented in the conference by Mikhail Gorbachev, behaved as a pliable subordinate to the United States. Israel’s political elite saw the opportunity to lead a ‘new Middle-Eastern order’ that would include — but transcend — the Arabs (with the Turks involved too). The Israeli ‘Middle-Eastern project’ did not have any qualms about its contexts and aspirations. It saw itself as a much more able and sophisticated successor to the Egyptian equivalent. In 1994, Israel’s then foreign minister, Shimon Peres, is reported to have told a regional economic summit in Casablanca: ‘Egypt led the Middle East for forty years and brought it to the abyss; you will see the region’s economic situation improve when Israel takes the reins of leadership in the region.’”
“The Israeli project was crushed by the intransigent realities of the endemic Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Israeli mood itself was changing. Yitzhak Rabin (Israel’s prime minister and ‘peace hero’) was assassinated by a young Jewish Israeli in what appeared to be a dramatic psychological dilemma brought about by the idea of peace with the Arabs, a dilemma confronting the whole of Israeli society. Shimon Peres was sidelined; and Benjamin Netanyahu, an Israeli hawk, came to power with a very different Israeli view, based not on an economic integration in the Middle East under Israeli leadership (Rabin’s and Peres’s objective), but on a forceful foreign policy aiming to impose Israel’s objectives on its neighbours — using military power if needed.”
“The rise of political Islamism significantly radicalized large sections of ordinary people, who increasingly saw their regime not only as ‘mistaken’ or even ‘corrupt’, but also as working with “the Jews” against ‘our brothers and sisters in Palestine’. Egyptians’ suffering under a coercive political climate had diluted their sense of belonging, their appreciation of their country’s identity, role and dignity, and their perception of themselves. Sensing the deterioration of their country’s (and their own) standing both in and outside the nation, the people’s perception of what their country (and they) stood for was increasingly muddled and perplexed. Egypt was no longer an Arab nationalist champion; it was not the custodian of a grand Arab dream, nor the fighter for ‘Arabic rights and dignity’; but also, it was not, at least in the people’s minds, a US ally, a follower of Saudi Arabia or a friend of Israel. This anger and frustration created feelings of discontent, restlessness and resentment. The regime’s judgement and the people’s feelings inhabited different worlds, and a significant part of Egyptians’ disappointment was targeted at the president himself. By his third decade in office, the only leader most of them had ever known was held responsible for many of their daily sufferings and resentments. The classic Egyptian jokes at the expense of their presidents, and the heated sighs of frustration, were turning into waves of demonstrations and, at times, violent manifestations of hatred. The 2005–9 period witnessed hundreds of riots, in which demonstrators often tore down billboard images of the president. Many writers, whether prominent in leading opposition newspapers or anonymous in student magazines across the country, accused him of being the cause of our backwardness and the protector of the powerful and corrupt. ‘Mubarak’s Egypt is his, not ours,’ said one demonstrator furiously. ‘He doesn’t care about us,’ shouted hundreds. The repeated and bitter mantra was ‘He has failed us’.”
“Sustaining the people’s consent to the political system that had implanted the military at the top of the country’s power structure was a strategic objective of the regime that ruled Egypt following 1952. Integrating the military into the country’s middle class made that possible. In Egypt, military hospitals and many social services are open for the public at subsidised prices; the army’s construction and contracting arms are amongst the best in the country, working on major infrastructure projects; almost every middle-class family in Egypt has a member who works in the army or one of its various sprawling entities. The lines between people and military blur.
The ascent of the capitalists in the last decade of Mubarak’s rule came at the expense of the military’s influence in many areas, and meant that the regime’s military face of the past half century was steadily replaced by one representing a distorted form of liberal capitalism.
President Mubarak’s own positioning changed; instead of being the military establishment’s representative in ruling Egypt, he became the ultimate authority in a new power structure dominated by some of the country’s most powerful financial centres. The military was now at a significant distance from President Mubarak and his circle of power, whose credibility and legitimacy were evaporating. And at the moment when the survival of Mubarak’s presidency depended on the military opening fire on more than a million people representing vast sections of the society, the army resolutely refused.”
Conclusion
“A teacher was arrested for fatally injuring an eleven-year-old student for failing to do his homework.”
“‘Egypt is becoming a very harsh place’ is a common sentiment. Many are desperately trying to flee. In 2006, around 8 million Egyptians (more than 10 per cent of the population, the vast majority of whom were under forty years of age) applied for the American green-card lottery; Egyptians are among the top five nationalities applying to Canada’s points-based immigration-approval scheme.”
“Cairo’s City of the Dead is the most conspicuous: an area of more than 8 square kilometres where (at least) 4 million poor Cairenes live and work in a crowded grid of tombs and mausoleums, forming a quasi-independent community. Many aspects of it are distressing, from the hundreds of thousands of children deprived of basic education to the lack of sanitation, but the city is also a beacon of creativity and make-do. Electricity is typica brought in by wires over roofs from nearby mosques’ public spaces; rooms are modelled to suit living requirements; and cooperative income sources are constantly invented. Similar circumstances, though on a smaller scale, exist in Garbage Village, home to more than 50,000 garbage workers (and their families), whose lives, like those of the millions living in the City of the Dead, are disconnected from proper Cairo.”
